News from April 2009

Memories and articles from back in the day

WTF is “the cloud” anyways?

One can barely move in IT and web cir­cles these days with­out hear­ing ref­er­ence to “the cloud” (in down­town San Francisco late last year I saw bill­board and bus ads all over talk­ing about the clouds!). But just what the dick­ens is it?

There’s a nicely title arti­cle at Google’s … Read more »

Opera turns 15

A big con­grat­u­la­tions to long time Web Directions sup­port­ers, browser devel­op­ers Opera. 15 years old today. (if you young­sters want a taste of the web in early 1994, or we old timers want to relive the glory days of ani­mated gifs and more (sadly no evi­dence of the blink tag)) … Read more »

Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting book from Rosenfeld Media — Published today

Web Directions speaker Donna Spencer has got to the end of that long jour­ney and today had her book, Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, pub­lished by Rosenfeld Media. Congratulations Donna!

In this book, Donna describes how to plan and run a card sort, … Read more »

Web Directions South 2009 Roadshow — It’s a wrap

Thanks very much to all those who came along last week in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney and made our first Web Directions Roadshow such a suc­cess. It was great to see such a good crowd come along to see the six excel­lent workshops.

All the pre­sen­ters said … Read more »

Web Directions speaker Dmitry Baranovskiy hits the big time

Many in the Australian Web indus­try (and beyond), par­tic­u­larly Web Directions atten­dees will know of Dmitry Baranovskiy, and in par­tic­u­lar his fan­tas­tic Raphaël JavaScript Graphics Library. Via the excel­lent Ajaxian site, it’s excit­ing to learn that Blackberry is using Raphaël for a new, highly inter­ac­tive and … Read more »

Offline web apps and client side storage with HTML5

Many web folks are prob­a­bly keep­ing one eye on HTML5, but it can be dif­fi­cult, with a great many par­al­lel devel­op­ments. We are all likely aware of some of the new ele­ments and seman­tics like , , and so on, but maybe less so of some more low … Read more »

Fonts on the Web

Regular read­ers will know the issue of embeddable/​linkable fonts for the web is more than a pass­ing inter­est here at Web Directions.

Today, font designer Tal Leming talks about the issues from the per­spec­tive of folks who design type­faces, while Jeffrey Zeldman inter­views Type designer David Berlow from … Read more »

Christian Heilmann at Yahoo! in Sydney

Christian Heilmann, JavaScript and web dev guru who we are bring­ing out for the road­show next week in Melbourne and Sydney, is also speak­ing at Yahoo’s offices in Sydney next Wednesday. So if you are keen to hear him, sim­ply RSVP.

On the road part II

For those of our read­ers in Japan, Web Directions Express, along with HTML5 and CSS3 work­shops by me, John Allsopp, will be on in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, in mid May. The work­shops and evening events are in English, trans­lated into Japanese. Details can be found at our Web … Read more »

On the Road again

This year’s Web Directions Roadshow, fea­tur­ing fan­tas­tic full day work­shops from local and inter­na­tional experts

  • Andy Clarke (Web Design)
  • Brian Fling (Mobile web design and development)
  • Grant Young (Social Media Strategy)
  • Indi Young (Information Architecture)
  • Christian Heilmann (JavaScript and Ajax)
  • Lisa Herrod (User Testing)

in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. If you’ve not yet booked, we’ve … Read more »

Know anyone who might be interested in presenting on cloud computing at Web Directions South this year?

John and I are keen to do a “brief­ing” on cloud com­put­ing in the Business track at Web Directions this year — see below for a descrip­tion of the way we’d see this ses­sion going. We’d like to find some­one who could present this ses­sion with­out nec­es­sar­ily empha­siz­ing any of … Read more »

WaSP’s amazing new education project and curriculum

With far less fan­fare than it mer­its, the Web Standards Project recently launched their truly amaz­ing “Interact” web edu­ca­tion project, and first stage of their detailed cur­ricu­lum for edu­cat­ing web professionals.

Frankly, it’s impos­si­ble to con­vey the amount and qual­ity of work that the team has put into it. … Read more »

Ask the browser makers — PEte LePage from the Internet Explorer team

In the first of what we hope will be a new, occa­sional series at Web Directions, we speak with PEte LePage Product Manager, Internet Explorer, Developer Division about their goals with IE8, com­pat­i­bil­ity mode, with IE7 emu­la­tion in IE8 is iden­ti­cal to IE7 and more about the browser. Thanks … Read more »

The perfect is the enemy of the good

The per­fect is the enemy of the good

Nice quote from Mark Pesce, who has an op ed piece in this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald about the world full of sur­prises which will open up with the government’s very hi-​​speed broad­band network.

Update: I … Read more »

Ignite Web — a great Melburnian night

Thanks to every­one who came along to Ignite Web last night at The Apartment in Melbourne, with par­tic­u­lar thanks to the pre­sen­ters for putting so much work into enter­tain­ing us all, Steve and Glo and the guys from … Read more »

Sub Cutaneous Human Interaction Technology at WDS09

Web Directions con­tin­ues to push the envelop of tech­nol­ogy use at our con­fer­ences. From our own social net­work­ing appli­ca­tions like web con­nec­tions, to unique visu­al­iza­tions of twit­ter and flickr traf­fic, blue­tooth video mes­sages from speak­ers and atten­dees and much more, we are at the fore­front of innovation.

So, Web Directions South … Read more »